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phony

adj
/ˈfoʊni/US

Etymology

Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of fawny (“gilt brass ring used by swindlers”) (1781), from Irish fáinne (“ring”).

  1. derived from fáinne — “ring”

Definitions

  1. Fraudulent

    Fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.

    • A good jeweler should be able to tell a real stone from a phony one.

  2. A person who assumes an identity or quality other than their own.

    • He claims to be a doctor, but he's nothing but a fast-talking phony.
    • What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were.

  3. A person who professes beliefs or opinions that they do not hold.

    • He's such a phony, he doesn't believe half of what he says.
  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. Anything fraudulent or fake.

      • One name was a phony, but the other was the true name. The clerk remembered the man who had filed the tags since he acquired two sets of plates with different names.

    2. To fake.

The neighborhood

Derived

Phony War, phony up, phoney up, Phoney War

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at phony. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01phony02beliefs03belief04reality05realness06real07fake08fraudulently09fraudulent

A definitional loop anchored at phony. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

9 hops · closes at phony

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA